Modelocked fiber lasers are increasingly displacing traditional solid-state lasers in ultrafast optic applications. Modelocked fiber lasers can be packaged in very small spaces and also exhibit superior mechanical and thermal stability. In particular, passively modelocked fiber lasers allow compact designs because of the absence of bulky optical modulators. Fiber laser systems are pumped using diode lasers with an emission wavelength shorter than the fiber laser emission wavelength. For upconversion-type fiber lasers, the pump wavelength can be longer than the emission wavelength. Generally, similar to the majority of all laser systems, the pump wavelength differs from the emission wavelength; a fact which is well known in the art.
Passively modelocked fiber lasers often comprise saturable absorbers to initiate and stabilize the pulse formation process. Examples of laser systems using saturable absorbers in this manner are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,689,519 ('519) to Fermann et al., which patent is hereby incorporated herein by reference, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,448,579 ('579) to Chang et al.
Semiconductor saturable absorbers have been implemented in modelocked lasers for a long time. Of particular interest are multiple-layer heterostructures as suggested in U.S. Pat. No. 4,860,296 ('296) to D. S. Chemla et al. However, these early saturable absorber designs were restricted in that they contained nonlinear layers with a spacing of exactly an integer multiple of a predetermined optical period. Moreover, the incorporation of multiple layer heterostructures as suggested by '296 relied on semiconductor layers with a thickness of less than 500 Å in order to exploit quantum-confinement effects. Such thin semiconductor layers generally restrict the bandwidth over which pulse shaping is possible with saturable absorbers.
A more workable saturable absorber solution was suggested in U.S. Pat. No. 6,252,892 ('892) to Jiang et al., where a resonant saturable absorber for passive modelocking of lasers was described. Moreover, '892 suggests distributed resonant saturable absorbers comprising layers of saturable absorber material separated by semiconductor layers not restricted to a thickness of less than 500 Å. Semiconductor layers with a thickness greater than 500 Å are indeed useful for maximizing the pulse shaping action of saturable absorbers.
As is well known in the art of passive modelocking of color center lasers (Islam et al., IEEE J. Quantum Electron. Vol. 25, pp. 4254 (1989)), the optically excited carriers in semiconductor saturable absorbers generally relax with different time constants. A first time constant of approximately 300 fs depends on the charge carrier density and excess energy of the hot photo-excited carriers due to intraband dynamics, e.g. thermalization and cooling of hot carriers to the band edge. A second longer time constant of 1 ps–30 ns is due to interband dynamics, e.g. the recombination of the carriers.
These different time constants can be easily realized if the hot charge carriers are excited well above (about an optical phonon energy above) the band edge. However, when the carriers are photo-excited at the band edge, the intraband contribution becomes weak due to the low carrier temperature. The excitation near-band edge is usually preferred in saturable absorber design because of the resulting resonant enhancement of the optical nonlinearity. In this case, the nonlinear optical response is governed by the interband dynamics including trap center assisted recombination and carrier relaxation with two different time constants cannot necessarily be observed and moreover, the ratio of carrier centers relaxing at the two different time constants cannot be controlled.
The interband dynamics are generally manipulated by introducing trap centers for photo-excited charge carriers either by arsenic anti-sites in GaAs-related material systems grown at low temperature or by implantation with ions. It has been readily reported (A. R. Hopfel, Ch. Teissl, and K. F. Lambrecht, Appl. Phys. Lett. 53, p. 12581 (1996)) that the trapping rate dominate the intraband dynamics in InP implanted with 200 keV protons (H+) at a dose of 1×1016 cm−2, when excited with 1.7 eV photons. The carrier trap time can be sub 100 fs and the cw luminescence shows a non-Fermi distribution, indicating the hot carriers undergo a recombination process before they cool down to the band edge.
For ultrafast fiber lasers modelocked by saturable absorbers as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,252,892 it was shown that cw modelocking is initiated by Q-switched mode-locking in the very early stages of pulse formation. Hence, Q-switch pulses in the cavity are used for the start of modelocking and the support of Q-switch pulses by a slow optical modulation process in the absorber is useful.
Hence, the first longer time constant can be used to initiate pulse formation, whereas the second shorter time constant can be used to stabilize the oscillation of short femtosecond pulses. However, to date no control of the ratio of carriers relaxing at these time constants was possible.
In fiber lasers, soliton shaping and or nonlinear polarization evolution can further be used to stabilize pulse formation as described in '519. However, to compete on an equal level with modelocked solid state lasers in ultrafast optics applications, modelocked fiber lasers should include the following: 1) the output polarization state should preferably be well defined, 2) the construction of the fiber laser should preferably be adaptable to mass production, 3) the required optical elements should preferably be as inexpensive as possible, and 4) the design concept should preferably comprise saturable absorbers with well controllable parameters. It is with respect to these four factors that current, conventional, modelocked fiber laser technology still needs improvement.
Early modelocked fiber laser designs, as exemplified in '519, relied on non-fiber components for stable operation. Although these early modelocked fiber lasers could further accommodate devices that enabled wavelength tuning, a fiber pig-tailed output signal with a well-defined polarization state was not easily attainable. Similarly, '579 also included bulk optical components.
Improvements in the basic design of modelocked fiber lasers were made possible by the use of fiber Bragg gratings to control the dispersion inside the cavity or as replacements for cavity-end mirrors in Fabry-Perot-type cavity designs (U.S. Pat. No. 5,450,427 ('427) to Fermann et al., which patent is hereby incorporated herein by reference). Moreover, the incorporation of polarization maintaining fiber was further suggested in '427 to limit the sensitivity of the cavity to mechanical perturbations of the fiber. These designs allowed compact wavelength-tunable set-ups as well as synchronization to external electronic clocks. Wavelength tunable passively modelocked fiber lasers were later also described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,097,741 ('741) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,373,867 ('867) to Lin et al.
Further improvements became possible by constructing cladding-pumped modelocked fiber lasers (U.S. Pat. No. 5,627,848 ('848) to Fermann et al., which patent is hereby incorporated herein by reference).
The need for bulk polarizers was eliminated by the implementation of all-fiber polarizers as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,072,811 ('811) to Fermann et al., which patent is hereby incorporated herein by reference. Such integrated modelocked fiber lasers could also incorporate fiber Bragg gratings for output coupling. The use of fiber Bragg gratings and all-fiber polarizers in the absence of any non-fiber polarization manipulating elements constituted a great simplification compared to single-polarization fiber lasers as discussed by DeSouza et al. (Electron. Lett., vol. 19, p. 679, 1993).
Limitations in integrated cavity designs arose from the need for fiber Bragg gratings written in polarization maintaining fiber to produce a linear polarization state of the output pulses. A high degree of laser integration has also been accomplished in the subsequent '741 and '867 patents. These designs lack high polarization extinction, all-fiber elements for polarization selection, and they rely on several concatenated intra-cavity polarization-maintaining fiber elements of extended length, which can induce the generation of satellite pulses at the fiber output. Indeed, as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/809,248, in the presence of concatenated fiber sections, pulse stability requires the single-pass group delay between the polarization axes of each fiber section to be larger than the generated pulse width. This is required to prevent any coherent interaction of intra-cavity pulses propagating along the two polarization axes at any coupling point, e.g., fiber splices. Such coherent interactions can generally produce temperature and fiber stress dependent instabilities, which are preferably avoided. Similarly, no all-fiber elements for controlling the spot size on an intra-cavity saturable absorber were described in '741 and '867.
Another method for producing an integrated cavity was introduced by Sharp et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,373 ('373)) where the use of a saturable absorber as an output coupler is described. A limitation with such designs is the required precision-polishing and AR-coating at the back-end of the saturable absorber to avoid the formation of satellite pulses inside the cavity.
The construction of high-power modelocked fiber lasers, as enabled by the use of multi-mode fibers inside a fiber laser cavity, is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,275,512 ('512) to Fermann et al., which patent is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
A passively modelocked fiber laser particularly suitable for producing pulses with a bandwidth approaching the bandwidth of the gain medium was suggested in U.S. Pat. No. 5,617,434 ('434) to Tamura et al. where fiber segments with opposing dispersion values were implemented. This design has limited functionality due to the presence of at least two long lengths of fiber with different dispersion coefficients for dispersion compensation, as well as the presence of non-polarization maintaining fiber, greatly complicating polarization control inside the cavity.
The design principles used in the patents mentioned above were reiterated in a series of recent patents and applications to Lin et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,097,741; U.S. Pat. No. 6,373,867, and application Ser. No. US2002/0071454). The designs described in Pat. Nos. '741 and '867 lack appropriate all-fiber, high polarization extinction, polarizing elements that are generally required to minimize the formation of satellite pulses at the fiber output. Moreover, these patents do not describe all-fiber means to control the spot size on the intra-cavity saturable absorber; control of the spot size is required to optimize the life-time of the saturable absorber. Equally none of the prior art describes ion-implanted saturable absorber designs with controlled ion depth penetration.